Monday, June 8, 2015

It's intermission time and you are
primed and ready. Smuggled in snack food? Check. Overpriced soda the
size of an old school Buick's headlight obtained officially on
theater premises? Check. Your eager film-going tocks firmly in place
in your cush, stadium setting multiplex chair? Check. Mass exposure
to a barrage of advertisement and trailers that stink of crass
come-ons and hucksterism like a dead dog in the Texas heat? Sad in
its absoluteness.

What I am listing here is the
lego-block-steps that many of us go through when we actually venture
out of our home/caves and crave something bigger than our monitors,
phones or TV's can provide. Steps one and two are touch and go hence
interchangeable, but the last two are inescapable. Advertisement is a
necessary beast for businesses, so if it is cloying or cheesy or
IQ-drowning, it is simply the nature of things. It is what it is.
Where the true scares begin is when the film trailers start rolling.

Going to see George Miller's latest,
the incredible and powerful right down to its very core MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, I got a big faceful of the death throes of American mainstream
cinema. (MAD MAX is spared because it is essentially an Australian
film made by an Australian director, albeit with big American press,
money and distribution behind it.) The first two trailers were both
based on characters from Marvel Comics, with the first being ANTMAN
and the second being yet another version of THE FANTASTIC FOUR.
(Never mind the fact that the last two attempts at bringing the
latter comic to life have failed pretty tremendously.) There are
amazing films based on comics. In fact two of my favorite films ever,
THE WATCHMEN and GHOST WORLD, were both based on equal but
differently brilliant graphic novels. However, I feel like Hollywood
is really starting the tap the Marvel/DC archive bone dry with this
business. You can hear the execs practically ejaculating in their
well tailored slacks at the merchandising dollars alone. You too can
have an ANTMAN burrito from Taco Bell! (Note: I have no idea if that
tie-in will happen, but would it surprise you? Yeah, me neither.)

Even worse, both trailers looked basic
as basic could be. There might as well been flashing text cuing all
of us blank-faced living dead rubes on when to laugh, gasp or ooh and
ahh. At this point, they are banking on if they slap a comic book
hero emblem on a monkey trying to suck its own weiner, there will be
enough suckers to fork over their hard earned dough for the second
saddest breads and circuses bullshit fiesta ever. (The first being
reality TV, of course.)

It didn't get any better with the next
trailer, another dog & pony paranormal show in the form of THE
GALLOWS. Bad lighting, hackneyed horror cliches, a cast that are
blander than the wardrobe selection on Dawson's Creek and the use of
a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that put me in the mindset
of hoping that Kurt Cobain will haunt everyone attached to this banal
looking horror film. In short, it does not look promising. In this
age of legitimately eerie “creepypastas” and indie horror
directors who are trying to add new chrome to a jet lagged wheel, THE
GALLOWS looks both dated and about as scary as NEW YEAR'S EVIL. (And
if you have seen that film, first of all I'm sorry and secondly, you
know exactly what I am talking about.)

Lastly, there was arguably the best of
the bunch, Guy Richie's remake/reboot/regurgitation of THE MAN FROM
U.N.C.L.E It looks well shot but incredibly arch. Plus Henry Cavill's
Napoleon Solo reads less Robert Vaughn and more like George Lazenby
in need of a tall glass of Metamucil. Realistically, it's probably
going through the motions as much as the other three, but is a little
more stylish. It is like the jaded stripper who cares enough to look
a little put together and nice, but is still going to bump and grind
with all the internal eroticism of a POW camp.

The divine yang to the awful yin was
Miller's latest addition to the Mad Max universe. FURY ROAD is
everything that those trailers are not. Truly invigorating, visually
stunning with some scenes echoing shades of the most vibrant
surrealists coupled with the metal-on-dust hyper realism of a
post-apocalyptic universe, characters who stand out, composition that
echoes masters like David Lean and Sergei Eisenstein and best of all,
an actual and beating heart. A film as good as MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
feels as fragrant and sweet as the best love letter. Not that the
film itself is that light and airy. Far from it but it is so
incredibly well made by a cast and crew who clearly cared enough to
treat us, the viewer, with actual respect and affection. The fact
that this film is cliche-less seals the whole envelope with a blood
and tear stained kiss. I will write more in-depth about this
extraordinary film at a later date, but needless to say, it has left
a huge imprint on me.

In a way, the creative success of this
film and its contrast to so much of the trite and bait and hack of
mainstream American cinema has tapped into something I have long
suspected. The era of big budget American directors crafting true
masterpieces is dead. There's a 1% exception, as there is for almost
everything in life, but in the bigger picture, forget it. The waves
upon waves of “reboots,” which is just another word for remake,
is proof of this. There are good remakes out there, but for every
John Carpenter's THE THING, we get Michael Bay's colostomy bag of
horseshit.

Don't get me wrong, nostalgia is a
dangerous and fetid emotion and Hollywood was and will forever be
about the bottom dollar. To quote Bobbi Flekman from THIS IS SPINAL
TAP, “Money talks and bullshit walks.” The only problem is that
the bullshit is the thing, again with some exceptions, bringing in
the money. The more bloated things get, the more apparent it is that
the true viable hope of American cinema is in the hands of two
specific types. Those who are currently in the belly of the beast,
slaving to get out from the inside and pull some beautifully
subversive cards from their deck and the true blue independent
artists out there. And I'm not talking “Miramax” indies either. I
am talking the men and woman who are working class artists writing,
editing, producing and directing out of a true need and want to do
something that is their own. There is always hope in this life and
with American cinema, it is resting firmly in these two divergent but
similarly-goaled twin hands.